The Flin Flon operation was legal science and medicine. It produced terrible pot grown underground by non–weed smokers. Da Kine was illegal hippies and growers smoking homegrown bud right in the shop. Briere, with his connections to the growers, dealers, and consumers, says he was perfectly positioned, and politically and financially motivated, to profit from and fight against the MMARs, which he believed were bad laws. Pot shouldn’t have to hide, he thought.
“A couple I know had three huge tanks from a gas station buried on their property,” Briere says, not exactly bragging but still proud of the ingenuity at work. “You opened a locked door to a small shed on their huge private property and move a bale of hay and open a trap door that led to a four-by-four-foot shaft with a ladder down to the tanks. In these tanks, they grew some of the province’s kindest bud.”
Briere says that in the early 2000s, the big money wasn’t in licensed designated growers selling medical pot at Da Kine in Vancouver, or even in selling to illegal dispensaries in Ontario or Quebec. The big money was in selling to the States, where an illegal pound of BC bud worth $2,000 could fetch US$3,000, before the significant conversion rate. This brought out creativity among the “middlers,” mules who connected the growers of BC with the American marketplace. These marijuana producers often straddled the laws and found a grey market in which to operate.
The designated grower clause in the MMARs was easy to abuse. Adam Greenblatt, a long-time cannabis activist and grower, opened a medical marijuana dispensary in Quebec that had 1,000 medical patients — perhaps 20 of them, he told me, had licences to obtain pot from their medical growers. What began for Greenblatt when he was a nineteen-year-old stoner on a quest to find relief for his father, who suffered from debilitating MS, became a lifetime of advocacy. He says that those 20 licensed people had prescriptions for enough legal marijuana — far superior to the PPS product — to provide for his other 980 patients.
Allan Rock’s licensing approval process began as an exercise in empathy and ended as a path for illegal growers to camouflage their businesses under the cloak of the law. Doctors were selling licences online — to grow and to consume — and Greenblatt says that it became trendy to get a medical cannabis licence and easy to hire a designated grower. Eventually, growers amalgamated their licences and leased warehouses. It wasn’t uncommon to find a warehouse with three hundred lights and thousands of plants. Designated growers were setting up operations to rival PPS, minus the headache of dealing with Health Canada regulations. Plus, the growers were crafty: if a stipulation said that a designated grower could only raise five plants, shrewd botanist inventors began producing marijuana plants the size of Christmas trees, sometimes ten feet tall and five feet wide. The MMAR system worked for some people like Terry Parker, and it was radical, progressive legislation. It also, however, opened itself up to abuse.
Don Briere says the proliferation of the designated grower licences fortified Canada’s stash of marijuana, and that the work could be dangerous. But the people Briere worked with, he says, were more likely to be middle-aged schlubs challenging each other for the most creative ways to ship weed than Hells Angels, gangsters, or members of the mob. The way he describes his cronies makes them sound like kids at summer camp sneaking out of their bunks. They used simple technology they had lying around. “One guy kept a tire machine in his truck, ditched the machine [heavy steel contraption], and put twelve pounds of hash in its casing and ran across the line,” recalls Briere, using the slang of the time to describe the American border. “Another middler I knew would take really, really kind weed, take the spare off his vehicle, and fill it up with marijuana — twelve or fifteen pounds — reseal the tire, and put it back under his vehicle. You throw some dirt, mud, and pepper on it, then drive across the line.”
PPS discarded its entire first crop of cannabis. At first, using at least some of Marc Emery’s seeds, just like Terry Parker, PPS produced many different strains all at different potencies, which made it difficult to properly dose. You don’t buy Tylenol and get a different potency each time. So that first crop was destroyed by Health Canada.
The agreement was that legal pot would be from 5 to 6 percent THC and sell for just over three dollars per gram. Meanwhile, the illegal marijuana had a street price from ten to fifteen dollars per gram and had a THC range, and pedigree, of uncertain denomination.
In August 2003, almost two years after the initial law passed, PPS produced another crop, with only two strains that met Health Canada requirements. And the government had PPS trash its plants — again. This time, the THC percentage was too high. PPS messed up because it did its job too well. “The government had no idea what they were doing, and Brent Zettl had no idea what he was doing,” says Lorne Gertner, who, despite his best attempts as part owner of PPS, couldn’t rectify the situation. “We tried everything,” says David Hill. “Prairie Plant Systems, flawed as it was, was ahead of its time” in terms of operating as a law-abiding successful Canadian cannabis company.
The solution to the uneven PPS dosing, dreamt up by Zettl, was to grind the cannabis plants into a fine green powder. Along with the buds went the seeds and stalk. Coming from a biotech background, and obsessive about producing anti-carcinogen tobacco through cross-pollination at his farm-meets-science labs, Zettl began to make marijuana into something like a smoothie. He didn’t smoke weed and didn’t know anything about the culture, so, while he may have created a synthetic Frankenstein product, it certainly couldn’t compete with Don Briere’s stash. “It wasn’t completely ineffective,” says Adam Greenblatt of the initial PPS product. “I think the less attached you were to the cannabis world, the less you cared about who grew your weed.”
Greenblatt didn’t stock PPS weed at the compassion clubs he ran in Ontario and Quebec. What he did do was try to run his clubs like legal businesses. These places weren’t like Da Kine in Vancouver. They shared DNA with Hilary Black’s place in Vancouver: they were insured, paid taxes, and required a licence of all their patients. They didn’t allow onsite consumption. Nothing groovy happened at 4:20 p.m.
Greenblatt says he tried the PPS weed at his club in Montreal. At the time, he was still selling cannabis in Ziploc bags, and he found the gold PPS packaging impressive. “I tried Prairie Plant Systems weed,” he jokes, “and I survived.”
Greenblatt has a grower’s analysis of the PPS product. He says it was dried too fast, so grinding it up resulted in the loss of terpenes, which provide cannabis with its distinct properties, like aroma and flavour. It clearly wasn’t as good as the cannabis grown by designated growers in BC and elsewhere, which could be among the finest weed in the world. These were growers with acumen and skill and years of practice and patience, who worked hard to source rare seeds and studied up on plant genetics — not to create a durable, replicable, evenly low-THC-dosed product, but to create a craft experience, a cannabis equivalent of a fine wine.
In 2003, Anne McLellan would again switch portfolios, moving from the Department of Health to become the minister of the Department of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness. This was post-9/11, and the American borders were much more tightly controlled. Again, in the same way that McLellan doesn’t think Rosie is cute, she has little time for guys like Don Briere. Violent crime was undoubtedly becoming associated with certain segments of marijuana, she says, and biker gangs would use their marijuana profits to fuel other wings of their business, including guns, prostitution, and hard drugs. With the American borders closed to them, the Canadian designated growers’ cannabis certainly reached untold Canadians without a medical licence.
Pot is bulky, smelly, and worth much less than cocaine. It’s not a great illegal business, but criminals, says McLellan, began attaching themselves to the nascent legal cannabis industry. Designated growers sent their oversupply of legal marijuana into Canada’s illegal black market.
McLellan says the pot file had become more dangerous, not less, after the passage of the MMARs. “When I leave Health and become in charge of Public Safety, what we’re really dealing with on the cannabis file is organized crime,” McLellan says, adding that in her new role, she was directly responsible for the RCMP and the police in every province. “On the cannabis front lines, you hear the stories. The police would tell me, ‘We’re dealing with organized crime and transnational crime.’ Everyone knows organized crime is moving BC bud across the border.”
McLellan says the problem with the MMAR laws was bad and getting worse, and the regulations needed change. These were the last days of Prime Minister Paul Martin. One day, McLellan received a phone call from the attorney general of Mexico. He said that Mexico needed the help of Canadians. Mexico was receiving a massive influx of BC weed.
Chapter 3 Recreational Opium
“Hit the man who offers it to you, and if you are not big enough to use your fists, take a club.”
Joseph Kehoe
Before BC bud became a problem for Mexico, there was a time in Canada when recreational opium, marijuana, and cocaine were legal. Today, police chiefs in Vancouver and Toronto are considering re-enacting this period in Canadian drug enforcement in response to the opioid crisis. “We’re recommending decriminalizing the possession of all drugs for personal use and connecting all people who use drugs with health and social supports,” Toronto’s medical officer of health said at the end of November 2021. Vancouver’s chief of police, Adam Palmer, said the same thing in the summer of 2020. In the spring of 2024, BC recriminalized the use of drugs in public spaces. However, the future of Canadian drug laws looks a lot like the drug laws of the Canadian past.
In the earliest days of this country, the production of hemp was encouraged by the British and Canadian governments. Hemp was used to make textiles and medical tinctures and treat infirmities from menstrual cramps to alcoholism to anxiety. Cannabis itself has cultural roots in Asia, Africa, and China. Some reports say Napoleon introduced marijuana to Europe after discovering and enjoying hash in Egypt in 1801. Cannabis boomed in the nineteenth century, including in 1820s Halifax, where you could pay your land taxes with a stalk of weed and buy pre-rolls of marijuana, like cigarettes, as medicine. (Pre-rolls are already-rolled joints that are sold individually or in packs and were a hit in the early nineteenth century and for the illegal dispensaries in 2015 and basically anytime they’ve ever been sold.) However, as we crept toward the twentieth century, drugs, both in the U.S. and Canada, were labelled “foreign.” Most of Canada’s not-yet-banned substances were imported from India and then China, and soon opium replaced cannabis as the medicinal, and recreational, drug of choice.
Dangerous and addictive — a curative, but also a cancer — opium soon became the target of the prevailing Victorian morality. Its prohibition was, in part, racist coding: an increasingly anti-Chinese sentiment became the rule of the land. In 1885, Chinese immigrants had to pay $50 to emigrate to Canada. In 1901, the head tax was raised to $100. Two years later, the price for Chinese people — and only Chinese people — to enter the country was $500 per person. In 1923, with 90 percent of the Chinese population living in Canadian Chinatowns, Canada would ban further Chinese immigration.
The early 1900s were a period of Canadian expansion. The work being done to accommodate this growth — the actual labour of laying down the British- and American-financed Canadian Pacific Railway — was largely accomplished by low-paid European and Chinese workers. The Chinese labourers, in particular, living among themselves and willing to work for low wages, were blamed for the economic hardships of white Canadians. Asian workers would take on jobs whites didn’t want, and do them for pennies on the dollar. This infuriated the working-class white population. Opium wasn’t prevalent in early-twentieth-century Canada, but because it was seen to be coming from China, it became lumped into the “Chinese problem.” Racism, like populist stumping, fear-mongering, and fake news, has always been a huge part of drug enforcement.
“Ideas about the morally degenerate but highly intelligent and cunning Chinese, played a key role in anti-drug discourse in Canada,” writes Catherine Carstairs in “Hop Heads” and “Hypes,” an exhaustive discourse on the advent of the 1908 Canadian drug laws. “Men identified as Chinese-Canadians came in for a disproportionate share of police attention for their drug use and many were deported to China as a result.”
In 1907, a wick was lit by low-income white rage, and Vancouver’s Chinatown became a backdrop for riots. Chinese homes and businesses were under attack. Arson was used as a physical and economic weapon. On September 7, 1907, eight thousand members of the Asiatic Exclusion League marched screaming through the intersection of Powell Street and East Cordova, waving torches behind a “Stand for a White Canada” banner. These rioters set fire to Japanese and Chinese homes and stores. Police were either overwhelmed, stood by and watched, or perhaps even abetted the destruction. The Asiatic Exclusion League, which would grow to forty thousand members in British Columbia by the 1920s, had begun in the United States and helped push Theodore Roosevelt — in 1907, the year of the Vancouver riots — to end Japanese immigration into the U.S. through Mexico and Hawaii.
But it was the Vancouver riots that helped kickstart Canada’s war on drugs.
It was three days after Vancouver’s fires went out that the provincial government of Richard McBride, founder of BC’s Conservative Party, promised to make amends to the Asian residents, including the legally licensed Asian Canadian opium producers. Three Chinese-owned domestic opium manufacturers sued for riot damages, but the result, once this became widely acknowledged, was backlash. Race and political populism were about to fuel the next hundred years of the policing of drugs. On July 1, the Opium Act of 1908, the first Canadian drug law, was enacted by the government of Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier. It stated that selling, manufacturing, or importing opium for non-medical purposes was against the law. The statute didn’t say anything about opium use or possession, but it outlawed the domestic licensed Chinese manufacturers and set a maximum penalty of three years’ imprisonment and a $1,000 fine for violating Canada’s new drug rules. It wasn’t a health issue that created the law. Akwasi Owusu-Bempah, an expert on drugs and policing who started Canada’s Cannabis Amnesty group in 2018, calls it “population control.”
Canadians, and Canadian law enforcement, have always had a love-hate relationship with drugs. In 1850, there was a tavern for every 450 Canadians. Fifty years later, 75 percent of those bars had closed. At the turn of the century, the mood across the nation was changing and the temperance movement was taking hold. The prime minister was William Lyon Mackenzie King. A teetotaler, and perhaps a virgin — a lifelong bachelor, he was never romantically linked with a partner, even for a fling — Mackenzie King was a man for his puritanical time. The first drug law in the United States was enacted in 1875, outlawing opium dens in San Francisco. London, England, banned cannabis in 1891, twelve months after the Lancet, a British science journal that’s still the world’s leading source of peer-reviewed medical information, raved about the medicinal properties of cannabis. “There may be no better medicine that we know,” the Lancet declared of marijuana, right before the substance was banned. “With drugs,” Catherine Carstairs tells me, “there has always been a disconnect between science and science fiction.”
In Canada, opium was outlawed in 1908, cocaine in 1911, and cannabis in 1923. Alcohol prohibition was looser in Canada than it was in the U.S., but bans on alcohol were intermittently enacted throughout Canada from 1901 to 1918. In the 1920s, the province of Quebec enjoyed some of North America’s loosest liquor laws. These North American trends from last century still, mostly, abide; the U.S. remains much more punitive than Canada with regard to drug laws. “America is still brutal with weed,” says Bruce Linton. “In America, they don’t have grey — it’s ‘Go to jail.’”
During the 1920s, cannabis became a lightning rod for scaring white folks. Opium had been banned, and even though marijuana wasn’t widely available in this country, it began to appear in the U.S. Migrants from Mexico, arriving in Arizona, California, and Texas after the Mexican Revolution of 1910, brought with them, according to Eric Schlosser’s Reefer Madness, “locoweed,” as Texas police referred to bud. “Marihuana” was the Mexican Spanish word for pot and replaced “cannabis” to underscore linguistically its dangerous foreignness. This fear of pot, and sensationalized stories of Mexicans going crazy while under the influence, spread to Canada and became part of our anti-drug conversation.
Emily Murphy, judge of the juvenile court of Edmonton, was an influential Canadian author and columnist. She voiced her opinions — from which many Canadians learned about drugs — through a megaphone for fake news. “A man or woman who becomes an addict seeks the company of those who use the drug, and avoids those of their own social status,” writes Murphy in The Black Candle, her influential book from 1922, which framed the drug conversation as part of an ugly discourse on race, “the Negro Menace,” and “the Yellow Peril.” “This explains the amazing phenomenon of an educated gentlewoman, reared in a refined atmosphere, consorting with the lowest classes of yellow and black men,” Murphy decrees.
With the rise of tabloid media, fear of “marihuana” was a story that sold. This discourse fuelled the growing newspapers, which thrived on outrage and fear.
(I use the word “marijuana” as a way of reclamation. It was only after legalization that “cannabis” became part of the vernacular, mainly as a way for Canadian licensed producers to make their product sound more scientific. “Marihuana” — spelled with the “h” — is archaic, but still used in Michigan; “marijuana” — spelled with the “j” — is the more common spelling. Either way, when “cannabis” re-entered the lexicon around legalization conversations, it was so the pot companies could align themselves with physicians, not Cheech & Chong. The choice of words was for business reasons. Rosie Rowbotham calls weed “marijuana,” and Terry Booth and Bruce Linton, in Vegas, talked about how they popularized “cannabis,” the word. I like the word “marijuana,” and so does Killer Mike, who won three 2024 Grammy awards.)
A representative Canadian story from 1908 covered the exploits of Won Way, a Chinese drug lord photographed in fur coats, who quipped that he owned the largest limousine in British Columbia. Way told reporters that he annually cleared $500,000 from his opium peddling — the same business that Emily Murphy said preyed on young white women.
“Canada didn’t really have a drug problem prior to the Opium Act, and we didn’t have people getting rich from marijuana in Canada before 1923,” Catherine Carstairs says. “Scared? Sure. And profiting? Some people did, I suppose, but really what we see is the mood of the country swings wildly in postwar Canada, and fear of immigration — fear of anything impeding on this mostly imagined vision of Victorian Canadian culture — creates this country’s first drug laws.”
The anti-drug narrative spread quickly throughout the world and, nearer to Canada, in the United States. Both Mexico and Canada, wanting to be seen on the world’s stage as virtuous, took legal action. These were violent, transformative times. In 1914, Canada entered the First World War and embarked on what was the bloodiest conflict in the country’s history, still to this day. To make matters worse, both domestically and abroad, 1918 saw the arrival of the Spanish flu. Between the flu and the war, Canada lost more than one hundred thousand lives, and against that backdrop, politicians wanted to be seen taking action against movements they had very little power to stop. The Opium Act of 1908 became the Opium and Drug Act of 1911, which became the Opium and Narcotic Drug Act of 1920. Drug laws were getting stronger and spreading.
The new face of the domestic peril in early-1920s Canada was opium. This was exemplified by a sad, tidy narrative: the life of Joseph Kehoe, a First World War hero whose fall from grace caused alarm nationwide. Kehoe, who probably never tried cannabis, would help bring about the demise of legal Canadian marijuana.
“Hit the man who offers it to you,” Kehoe advised Canadian youth on how to resist the opium peddler’s enchanting temptations, “and if you are not big enough to use your fists, take a club.”